Blackout a Reminder of Grid's Vulnerability to Terror

By Antonio Regalado and Gary Fields
747 words
15 August 2003
The Wall Street Journal
A4
English
(Copyright (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

When the lights went out from Cleveland to Canada to Connecticut yesterday afternoon, many people's first thought was "terrorism."

As it turns out, the big blackout apparently stemmed from a cascading outage beginning with equipment problems in the Niagara Falls region, made worse by high summer energy demand. But the power-grid breakdown is a vivid reminder of the risks a terrorist attack poses to the U.S. energy infrastructure -- as well as the difficulty of securing facilities and the cost of doing so.

Experts say the U.S. power grid remains a weak link, even two years after the terrorist attacks against the Pentagon and World Trade Center raised concerns about the vulnerability of nuclear plants, water systems and other elements of the country's infrastructure.

A report issued last year by an independent task force, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and headed by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, warned that "a coordinated attack on a selected set of key points in the electrical power system could result in multistate blackouts. While power might be restored in parts of the region within a matter of days or weeks, acute shortages could mandate rolling blackouts for as long as several years," due to shortages of spare parts and other supplies.

The Council on Foreign Relations report made several recommendations for the government to secure the grid: fund energy-distribution vulnerability assessments; fund a stockpile of modular backup components to quickly restore the operation of the energy grid should it be targeted; and work with Canada to put in place adequate security measures for binational pipelines.

Many elements of the U.S. power grid still remain vulnerable to sabotage. Aging control systems, easy-to-reach power stations and miles of unprotected high-voltage wires all make the nation's electrical grid a relatively soft target for saboteurs.

An official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation familiar with infrastructure-security concerns said that while some steps have been taken, authorities have focused on securing nuclear-power plants and other facilities whose destruction might pose the greatest risk to life. "If you tried to do everything and harden every transformer, pretty soon you'd get to a point where electricity would be unaffordable," he said.

To be sure, some experts said it would be difficult to cause widespread damage by attacking the electrical-transmission infrastructure. "You would have to know the system in depth and pick just the right time to get a blackout of this magnitude," says Stephen Connors, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., and the former director of its electric-utility program. "I think the risks are quite limited."

Mr. Connors noted that big, cascading blackouts like the one yesterday tend to be freak occurrences. A major power outage in the Northwest during the 1990s was caused by trees getting tangled in transmission lines, he says.

However, electric companies are still vulnerable to both physical and cyber-based attacks, security analysts said. Of particular concern are antiquated methods used by some utilities to control transformers and other remote stations. Known as Scada systems -- short for supervisory control and data acquisition -- some still are operated via telephone.

The Electric Power Research Institute, a research organization for the power industry in Palo Alto, Calif., is trying to help electric utilities convert to modern systems that use computer encryption to keep hackers out. "We think the most dangerous combination would be a physical attack and someone playing around with the control systems at the same time," said Tom Kropp, manager of enterprise information security at EPRI.

Separately, 22 utility companies have given EPRI $1.8 million to conduct an assessment of the industry's vulnerabilities, including natural-gas supplies and communications systems. Clark Gellings, EPRI's vice president for power delivery and markets, said the so-called Infrastructure Security Initiative is looking into how to move massive transformer components around the country in case of an emergency. Mr. Gellings said he hoped the Homeland Security Department will pay to implement the safety plans: "There is no way the industry can afford it."

Although the federal government is concerned about the safety of the U.S. energy infrastructure, the electrical grid is mostly owned by private companies. MIT's Mr. Connors said: "No one knows whose job it is to pay for this."

Document j000000020030815dz8f0003g